Fox Business Network

Democrats have famously said they will make up $240 billion in Medicare cuts by eliminating waste and fraud. But Big Government's Pork Report offers daily reminders that the political class is practicing business as usual:

U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion in federal farm aid to the estates or companies of deceased farmers.

San Francisco receives federal funding for AIDS patients who died decades ago.

Perhaps the bureaucrats mistook the deceased for some of their colleagues on break.

A Thomson Reuters study released this week painted a bleak picture about the health care system:

"The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill"...

But the analysts think they have the solution:

"The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care."

But that will never happen. What's the bureaucrats motivation? Any money recovered is taxpayers' money... there's plenty more where that came from. Unions and the civil service rules protect their jobs whether they perform or not.

There are already plenty of laws on the books to attack waste — but they're rarely enforced. That would be work. And if the bureaucrats did the work, it would be an nasty invasion of doctors’ and patients’ privacy.

Since government is spending other people’s money, there will always be fraud.